Tag: gender

Saw Wonder Woman (Yes I know about the political issues, no you don’t need to tell me) wept profusely, it’s very good, although some of the costuming leaves some stuff to be desired and like the art direction is… like not amazing (but it’s very good and moving and what not).

It also gave me a lot of gender feels that I have a hard time articulating like there’s all this media with interesting badass women coming out and I still feel on a very fundamental level that “I’m not one of them” not in a “not like other girls” way, but in an “I’m not a girl” way, because like the characters I relate and respond to best and most are all men and IDK why

IDK I Feel Like The Way Women Are Often Socialized To Deal With Bodies and Beauty and Shit

Really fucks you up, and fucks up your relationships with other women a lot of the time.

Like sex work has really changed a lot of my perspectives on shit because we live in a society where women are told that their primary value is their sexual desirability and nothing else they do matters if they’re not hot, and like how you know if you’re hot or not is how many men want you, and like we’re told men are these constantly horny lust machines with essentially identical parameters for what’s desirable and so anytime there’s a guy who doesn’t want you, you must be defective somehow.

And like hotness in this worldview is objective and sort of a zero-sum game and like it leads to a really shitty competitive thing between women and like IDK maybe I’m really gay or really primarily gay or something or it’s partially just being a sex worker, and really having the whole “yeah, I know I’m desirable” thing because work really covers that need for me, but like I don’t have that feeling towards other women and like I’m not saying “Oh I’m so good for not being like that, look at how good I am” or anything cause like it’s just an acculturated thing and like I don’t know how to deal with it, but like it’s come up in like my sexual relationships with other women where like they’d literally tell me that whatever about my body or appearance made them insecure somehow or like that attention I got from men made them feel hurt, and I’m also not saying “Oh, I’m secure in my position as hottest, I win” because like there are definitely like circles in which I’m not the babeliest babe or whatever because I don’t appeal to that demographic and my girlfriends would sometimes get more attention than me in those and like I didn’t care because like “the hot girl chose me, so…” so I didn’t mind them getting attention and like my girlfriends have all been really gorgeous in my opinion, and I don’t think hotness is an objective quality or a zero-sum game at all, but like it’s just really depressing that that’s a thing and that like “But I’m with you” isn’t enough to turn the culture of competition into something else.

And like I see young women jockeying for position of “resident hottie” in various spaces (usually male dominated spaces) because society has told them that’s what they have to be to be valid, and like if you want to do stuff in a male dominated space you have to be the hottest girl or there’s sort of no point and it’s just… like depressing and fucked up and like IDK when I was younger, and not doing sex work, I did often hang out in places with lots of boys because they were all like… fairly nice to me because I was decorative and like I liked some of the same stuff they liked so it felt good to be there, and like I probably would have felt pretty upset if another girl had come along and I’d sort of ended up in the cold because I wasn’t the pretty one anymore, and so like it’s a social dynamic that’s really perpetuated by men only being friendly or kind to women if they perceive them as sexually interesting and like how there’s only room for like a sort of “token girl” in a lot of heavily male interest circles, and so yeah I’m also definitely not saying that “look at these silly girls, hating other girls because they want to feel like the prettiest” because like it happens for a fucking reason, but it still sucks,

You Know…

I find that when you include trans women in your analysis of stuff that’s supposedly only an issue for cis women you actually get a way more complete and nuanced picture of the shape of patriarchy.

Like reproductive coercion often including forcible sterilization of trans women (as well as other groups of women the patriarchy hates especially hard), and like I was just thinking about how things considered to be “initiations into womanhood” are often socially considered to be marked by blood (menarche, loss of virginity) and then I realized that gender confirmation surgery for trans women is discussed a lot more than it is for trans men and talked about in terms a great deal bloodier and more violent than it is for trans men and I just think that’s really interesting (obviously one does not need to experience menarche, bleed during the loss of one’s virginity or lose one’s virginity at all, or go through gender confirmation surgery to be a woman, it’s just that society seems to consider these to be things that are initiatory into womanhood) so like basically whenever I think about stuff that’s supposed to be associated with uteruses and what not… I think there’s pretty much always something that’s like socially analogous that trans women go through and we’re never going to get rid of patriarchy if we don’t acknowledge that.

Masculine Coded Masochism vs. Feminine Coded Masochism

The iconography of sexual submission is sort of… separated into gender coded categories and I think they’re sort of coded like this (this is not to say this accurately reflects individual people’s desires/motivations, but that like the depictions in most bdsm porn are coded this way, and like cultural perceptions about the motivation for this behavior are considered differently based on gender):
Masculine coded masochism/submission is associated with the tradition of courtly love, the willingness to subjugate oneself to the object of one’s desire, to go on the quest, to be enslaved by love. To prove oneself to the desired object. It is about desiring someone so intensely that you act *for* them.

Feminine coded masochism/submission is associated with the desire to be so intensely desired that one is sexually “devoured” by one’s lover. It is about someone wanting you so intensely that they act *upon* you

I Feel Like The Proletariat Is Under A Lot More Pressure to Be “Moral and Respectable” Than The Bourgeoisie Is

Like prole girls are slut shamed more, our sexualities are pathologized constantly, we have to worry a lot more about seeming like good housekeepers, wives, and mothers because our housekeeping, wifely behavior and mothering is constantly policed… we’re told we’re too loud, too slutty, too slovenly, too selfish and neglectful of our children…

Working class men are under constant pressure to “be men” and look and act appropriately respectable and “manly” but also they’re pathologized as Stanley Kowalski style brutes (even though I’ve met far more brutes who were frat boys than proletarian brutes) also like bougie dudes are way more likely to get an “Awww” when they’re portrayed doing domestic labor and prole dudes are way more likely to be accused of being emasculated…

IDK if we’re not “nice and respectable and deserving” we can be tossed from the relative safety and security of the “stable” working class into the hard living lumpen proletariat…